In an ideal world, you would send out an email, post on LinkedIn or share a piece of content and a few minutes later your phone would ring or an enquiry would drop into your inbox from someone looking to buy from you. Wouldn’t that be great?
The fact is that how our customers buy today is much more sophisticated than that. When you think about the last time you made a significant purchase, you didn’t just see one advert or piece of marketing and immediately buy it.
Your marketing creates the context and environment in which your customers choose to buy from you. Whether they’ve seen your van driving around, or they’ve met you at a networking event, or seen you on LinkedIn, they are going to check you out. They’re going to look at your website, take a look at your social media and if you do email marketing, read your emails. The more they look at, the more likely they are to contact and buy from you.
Your social media, email marketing and website have to do the following:
- communicate and reinforce your key messages and core offering
- demonstrate your unique selling point
- position you as a credible expert
- feature your testimonials and case studies
- offer them an easy next step to engaging with you
- share content that helps them make a credible and informed buying decision.
This is the very minimum of what your marketing needs to do in order to support your sales activity. Now, that’s not to say they’ll see this and immediately call you up and ask to buy from you, you still need to do your sales activities. However, your marketing keeps you in the forefront of their mind, keeps them warm and educates them in making a smart buying decision, i.e. buying from you. Marketing is the context and environment that determines whether they will buy from you or not.
